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The psychology of online dating

A set of graphs doing the rounds on Twitter recently purported to show the changes in how heterosexual and homosexual couples meet.

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While categories such as "through friends", "in a bar", and "at school/work" were either declining or holding steady, one category has exploded in the last decade: "met online". According to these stats, 20 percent of heterosexual couples sampled, and nearly 70 percent of same-sex couples met this way and its growth shows no signs of abating. But is dating online that different from the traditional methods on a psychological level?

For those actively looking for a relationship (or at least no-strings fun), there is no shortage of websites available, from straight up dating sites like OKCupid, eHarmony and Match to niche communities like Tastebuds (music matching), JDate (for Jewish singles) and even the eyebrow raising Clown Passions (you can guess). While these sites vary in terms of features and cost, the basic setup is the same each time: you create a profile, upload a picture and then send out messages to those who seem your type. As a rule of thumb, women are inundated with messages and replies, while men barely get any, as demonstrated by a fascinating experiment involving dummy accounts on OKCupid here. In summary, over four months with identical profile content the subjectively most attractive female avatar had maxed out "her" inbox with 528 messages, while the most handsome male account had received just 38.

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All but the most basic online dating sites include some kind of algorithm to try and partner customers up with someone they'll hit it off with, with varying degrees of scientific hype behind their advertising copy. The notion that "opposites attract" is completely bulldozed over, for the quite legitimate fear of inundating each dater with people they will absolutely despise. A recent paper from the Association of Psychological Science was pretty clear that there's little evidence for any matching algorithm's scientific merit ("no compelling evidence supports matching sites" claims that mathematical algorithms work"), but the OKCupid users I spoke to generally seemed to believe there was something in it -- even if it was just filtering out their polar opposites. In fact in some cases, the subtext was that it worked a bit too well: "The guy with the highest match percentage that I went on dates with seemed more like a friend, though. We were eerily similar in some ways," one woman confided.

The usual criticism of online dating is that it's a hive of airbrushed photos and downright lies, and while there seem to be small deviations from the truth, most experienced daters I spoke to said the people they had met had for the most part represented themselves fairly. A couple of scientific studies come to slightly more critical conclusions, one saying that a third of pictures could be considered misleading, while the other concluding that misinformation was ubiquitous but in a very mild way: an inch added to the height, or a pound taken off the weight.

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Anything more obvious than this would of course cause problems when the eventual meetup occurs -- it's easy to overlook someone being an inch shorter than advertised, but night on impossible to successfully hide a five stone weight gain without repercussions.

The study concludes that these small lies were not merely self-deceptions, but deliberate. While most daters I surveyed claimed honesty in their profiles (any eventual meetup would be short-lived if they weren't), one did raise an interesting point about subjectivity: "I'm honest in so far as anyone can be objective about themselves".

[Quote"]When a subscription is involved people are more keen to progress offline to actual dates and abusive messages are at a minimum[/pullquote]

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My questions also raised some interesting views about paid sites against unpaid, with three distinct themes emerging when a subscription is involved: people tend to be looking for something more serious, they're more keen to progress offline to actual dates and abusive messages are at a minimum. All of this can be traced back to payment: a need to get your money's worth, and a fear of wasting it by getting banned. Still, the more serious nature isn't for everyone. As one online dater put it, when I asked about her experience on Match.com: "It was a lot of people looking for their wife and/or trophy person. So yeah, there were doctors and lawyers on there, but in a way their messages were inherently more creepy than what I get on OKCupid."

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Ah, the creepy messages. Spend any amount of time on OKCupid packing dual X chromosomes and you're likely to be indecently propositioned or sent abusive messages with more regularity than you'd hope for in a civilised society. This is no secret, with plenty of websites documenting the phenomenon (all links often not work safe). Why does this happen?

Psychologist Dr Jessamy Hibberd believes that along with the usual internet level of trolling, much of the directness in online dating occurs because all interactions are in a "social vacuum". With no mutual friends to avoid alienating, there's less social pressures to keep behaviour in check, and it's more akin to a stranger relentlessly hitting on you in a club. On top of this, anonymity and the lack of social cues that a face-to-face meeting would provide can cause the more obnoxious sides of humanity to emerge with depressing regularity, where no attempt is made to connect with the masses of information available on a profile.

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The people you meet through online dating are unlikely to enter your life in any other context

This is of course, one of the most striking differences between online dating and meeting someone in a bar: you're armed with all kinds of information about your date, albeit only what they decide to share on a semi-public forum, with room for dishonesty by omission. If a couple sends a few messages back and forth and then decide to meet, they go into their first date possibly knowing a dizzying amount of information about their one another. The paper cited previously suggests that rather than ensuring you run out of things to talk about, this can actually improve a date's chances, stating this "has the potential to foster a greater attraction upon a first meeting", but only if this virtual period is kept brief -- "a few weeks or less" -- after which time the effect seems to diminish.

But is there a danger in the "shopping list" nature of dating sites harbouring unrealistic expectations? It's one thing to be told that there's "plenty more fish in the sea", but quite another when the sealife is grouped together by interests, availability and flattering photographs. The wealth of available singles flooding the mind can also cause conflation of information, and here the paper from the Association of Psychological Science is unequivocal: "browsing many profiles fosters judgemental and assessment-oriented evaluations that can cognitively overwhelm users". Hibberd concurs there could also be a perpetual "grass is greener" attitude inherent in date shopping culture: "You can hold in your head an ideal, and different profiles suggest that ideal might still be out there, which could have an impact. But I do think it depends on the intentions of the person as well, and why they're online in the first place."

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I asked OKCupid co-founder and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan about this, and his view is that dating cycles tend to be shorter online, but for entirely different reasons: "We don't see any data that suggests people skew toward shorter relationships ex ante, but that people are more willing to leave unsatisfying relationships because there's less friction to finding a new person to date. So, average relationship length comes down, but not because people seek that."

Graham Jones, a psychologist specialising in internet psychology, is more positive, seeing a parallel with the internet's streamlining approach to retail: "Five years ago when people were choosing to buy a new car they would visit, on average, eight different dealers. Nowadays the average is down to 1.2. Five years ago people went from dealer to dealer, now they go from website to website. Because people are seeing more fish in the sea, their final chosen date is much more likely to get more commitment."

Of course, this relies on the approach of a single date at a time, which is far from the norm online. While it can make people uncomfortable offline, dating more than one person concurrently before "picking one" is extremely common and generally accepted online. Hibberd believes that you may need a "thicker skin" to deal with this, but it's clear that the online environment will provide one pretty quickly, in part aided by the constantly rotating selection of singles activating and deactivating their profiles. "It does make it easier to overcome rejection", one OKCupid user tells me, adding: "Interestingly, I've found it way harder sending the 'let's just be friends' text than receiving it."

So does that mean the casual nature of internet dating can lead to less commitment and direction than you would get with a more focussed, blinkered offline approach where potential partners' availability is less obviously defined? Possibly. But one thing is undeniable: the people you meet this way are unlikely to enter your life in any other context. And Jones remains adamant that rather than being unpredictable and dangerous as stereotyped, internet dating can actually keep us safer, at least on a psychological level: "One of our fundamental psychological drivers is to find certainty. Traditional dating is perceived as a danger to us because it involves so much uncertainty. The internet removes that danger from us."